New life for Moore's Law

Beyond silicon Here are some technologies that could help chipmakers improve their products for years to come, thereby extending Moore's Law: Spintronics: This technique, heavily promoted by IBM, relies on interpreting the magnetic field created by an electron's spin (rather than the transport of electrons). Opinions of its value vary widely. Phase change: This is a memory technology that relies on heating, and reheating, CD-like material. Philips and Intel back it, but promises of its imminent arrival have been around for years. Nanowires and nanotubes: These devices transport electrons from one point to another to create a 1 (or don't transport them, to create a 0). Unlike silicon, they don't leak and transport electrons rapidly. Unfortunately, no one yet knows how to put billions into arrays. Crossbar latches: This is one of the more radical transistor makeovers, but one that Hewlett-Packard says is further along than competing technologies. A key advantage is that a single chip can contain many bad circuits but still function perfectly. HP hopes to see these in products toward the turn of the decade. Resistance switching: Take a customized molecule, then observe how its electrical resistance changes under controlled circumstances. If this works, it could lead to small memory chips that assemble themselves. III-V compounds: These materials behave like silicon but are faster. They also cost a lot more. Intel and Qinetic are working on a transistor from these materials that relies on quantum properties. Optoelectronics: weigh 250,000 times less than electrons, so why not use them to carry data? Bringing optical technology down to the processor level, however, will be tough. DNA: Some believe that the way in which amino acids combine in genetic material could be used to identify diseases. The snapshot assessment: specialized and speculative. Immersion lithography: This technique entails putting wafer in water and shooting the picture. Two years ago, it sounded crazy, but nearly every manufacturer will adopt it in a few years. Imprint lithography: A stamp is immersed in liquid to create a pattern. Advocates say it cuts costs. The microscopic patterns on stamps are created through e-beam lithography, a process invented in the '80s when Moore's Law was said to be doomed but which never succeeded commercially. HP likes it. EUV lithography: By using highly polished mirrors and a laser originally devised for missile defense, EUV machines can create lines a few nanometers in length. Intel, AMD and IBM are the big proponents. It may go into production in 2009. --Michael Kanellos Moore's Law began as a guess that grew in power over timeUSA Today Time running out on Moore's LawComputerWeekly.com Tiny transistor, big featSt. Louis Post-Dispatch Moore's Law relevant but not foreverInternetNews.com Intel bolsters Moore's Law with multi coresComputerworld Moore's Law due for retirementForbes Holy whistling helium! Another quantum trickThe New York Times Intel to redefine performance at IDFExtremeTech The coming chip revolutionBusinessWeek Editor: Mike Yamamoto Associate editors: Desiree Everts, Yvonne Guzman Design: Ellen Ng Production: Michelle White By Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com April 19, 2005 4:00 AM PDT Princeton professor Stephen Chou believes he has come up with a way to keep the semiconductor industry rolling forward, and it resembles something Henry VIII might have worn on his royal vestments. Chou, who also founded Nanonex, is one of the prime advocates of "imprint lithography," a process that involves pressing an ornate template into a liquefied substrate to create a circuit pattern, similar to how a signet ring worked. In experiments, he has managed to create features measuring 6 nanometers, one-fifteenth the size on today's chips. "Ten years ago, people said, 'This is crazy. You will never use technology to make things this small.'" --Stephen Chou, professor, Princeton "Ten years ago, people said, 'This is crazy. You will never use technology to make things this small,'" Chou said. Imprint lithography--along with silicon nanowires, phase change memory, optoelectronics, 3D chips and other technologies once largely considered scientific curiosities--is among the many emerging technologies that could extend the life of , the famous computing principle whose demise has been predicted repeatedly over the last few decades. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's early observation about the rate of progress in the electronics industry--specifically, that the number of transistors on a microchip double every one to two years--turns 40 on Tuesday. Under this principle, chipmakers have managed to steadily boost the performance of their products while simultaneously dropping the price, a rare confluence that has allowed digital technology to seep into virtually every segment of the . Success, however, has created its own problems. Decades of doubling transistors has led to chips containing and multibillion-dollar factories to produce them. Shrinking the size of transistors and the copper wires that connect them to fit more onto a chip has led to problems with electric leakage, power consumption and